Joshua Klein

Computing

Computing By Joshua Klein

Belkin to use Airgo's MIMO for WiFi

Seems that Belkin is going to start using Airgo's MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output) technology in their wireless gear that lets you quadruple the speed of 802.11g from its current maximum of 54Mbps to over 200Mbps. The catch is the same one you'll find with all that Netgear and Linksys gear which doubles the speed of 802.11g to 108Mbps: none of the equipment is interoperable, so to get the full benefits of the boost you have to use the right kind of Belkin wireless access points with the right kind of Belkin wireless cards. The good news is that Airgo's MIMO format could very well end up as the basis for the new 802.11n protocol that is being hammered out by the IEEE, which means we might possibly see it in other devices in the not-too-distant future. The wireless access points should go for around $189 and the cards for $130 when they arrive sometime in mid-October.

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News By Joshua Klein

WiFi jail management

Keeping people locked in cages has never been so complicated, but the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office in Florida is taking things to the next level with their new WiFi network. Besides using the system for wireless handhelds, they're also using the WiFi to monitor inmate location, keep track of inmates records and photos, and for making VoIP phone calls between deputies. It isn't as Orwellian as it could be—there are no wirelessly-enabled cameras in the showers and the guards can't use WiFi to remotely activate your shock collar, but at least if we find ourselves spending a night in the Pinellas County jail we'll be able to while away the time looking at Internet porn. (At this point taking away our laptop would surely count as cruel and unusual punishment, wouldn't it?)

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Smartphones By Joshua Klein

Motorola to drop the MPx220 Smartphone on us on September 27th?

We wouldn't bet our first-born on it, but PhoneMag swears up and down that a "trusted source" has confirmed for them that Motorola will be brightening our lives with their new MPx220 Smartphone on September 27th. The MPx Pocket PC Phone is supposed to appear a couple of months later, on November 30th, but we've heard rumors that it's been delayed until early next year. [Via Smartphone Thoughts]

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Apps

Apps By Joshua Klein

Magic Messenger for kids

Today's fast-paced world demands ever more of our children and the Magic Messenger is here to help. It's a neat little device with a full QWERTY keyboard that connects to a landline and lets you send text messages to both cellphones and regular phones (converting your child's message to speech if the recipient's phone isn't text message-capable). Only available in the UK right now, the Magic Messenger costs £20 (which includes an initial three month subscription) and £4.50 every three months after that, with texts costing 10p each. It also has group sending, so your kids can blast messages out to many people at once, letting them learn the ways of the cellphone spammer at a young age. [via Textually.org]

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Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity By Joshua Klein

Austrian researcher Bluesnarfs at 1.08 miles

Get that little lead bag for your cellphone ready; long distance Bluesnarfing (aka using Bluetooth to hijack a cellphone or PDA) is here. An Austrian Bluetooth researcher in Santa Monica Bay recently used an antenna and a modified dongle (don't do this at home, kids) to steal the entire address book as well as send an SMS from a target phone 1.08 miles away. (Looks like they could have also used the BlueSniper we reported on yesterday.) Along the way they saw dozens of Bluetooth devices that were similarly vulnerable, although they say they focused only on that one phone. Bluetooth-enabled cellphone makers (we're looking in your general direction, Nokia) are denying that Bluesnarfing is a serious risk because it has to be done in such close proximity to the victim, but it looks like that theory's out the window... [UPDATE: We've just been contacted by the Flexilis team who conducted the experiment in conjunction with Martin Herfurt, the Austrian researcher. They organized the event with Martin. Thanks, John!]

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Computing

Computing By Joshua Klein

Tiqit handheld not dead

Sometimes a handheld comes out of left field and sort of blindsides you - the Tiqit is one of those. It's been so long since we'd heard anything about it that we'd figured they'd just quietly faded away, something which isn't totally unheard of for a startup. But not so! The Tiqit is alive and well, sort of. Like the OQO, it's a handheld computer that runs on Windows XP (though it'll also run Linux and Unix), but has a pathetically slow CPU (just 300MHz, or slower than most regular PDAs these days). Yeah, it has a full 56-key keyboard and a mouse stick with left/right buttons, but it's awfully thick and heavy, weighing in at a hefty 1.25 pounds. If we're lucky the next version will be slimmer, trimmer, and sport some built-in WiFi; assuming that the Tiqit survives long enough to see a second edition.

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Mobile By Joshua Klein

Viewtoothing - Viral video marketing via Bluetooth

British company Forbidden Technologies thinks they've stumbled on yet another form of viral marketing: "viewtoothing", which mainly involves people using Bluetooth to beam each other video clips using their cellphones. And of course they have a new application called FORmobile that let's people do just that (as if it were somehow impossible to share video clips over Bluetooth already), which is handy because they want to sell it to marketers as way to expose consumers to clips of movie trailers, advertisements, etc. who will then share them with their friends (that's the viral part). Too bad they're going to discover the limitations of viral marketing when they see how badly the term "viewtoothing" fails to catch on. [Via Textually.org]

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News By Joshua Klein

Audiophiles rejoice: Nordic Concept's reference turntable

You thought you were an audiophile? Well chew on this: the Nordic Concept turntable has two different cabinets, one for the platter, and one for the motor and phono preamp. The idea is that the very thin belt minimizes any transfer of vibrations from the motor, and the huge platter further minimizes vibration and assures a perfectly flat surface for your records. They've got ceramic bearings, vibration damped cabinets, and an extra heavy puck for level adjustment - and did we mention the "unconventional Nordic design"? Of course this all comes at a price - $9,800 for the turntable without preamp, $15,500 with. Quality doesn't cheap, you know.

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Accessories

Accessories By Joshua Klein

Orange launches 3G/GPRS wireless laptop card in the UK, joins crowd

Looks like Orange wants to be one of the cool kids now (we reported on T-Mobile UK's 3G/GPRS launch last last month), and is providing its own 3G/GPRS card for PC owners. This enables users to access the web at top speeds near a respectable 384Kbps - that's "near broadband" for the marketers among us. Given that Orange claims to have a wider 3G network than its rival, Vodafone, (covering 60% of the UK population as opposed to a measly 42%) this is good news. The downside may lie in usability; rumor has it the interface on the Orange cards aren't as good, and only time will tell how reliable its network connectivity is and what kinds of download speeds subscribers can realistically expect.

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Mobile By Joshua Klein

FCC rules spam illegal for mobile devices, sort of

The FCC have ruled that marketers must have explicit permission from anyone with a wireless device before they send them spam, a ruling eerily similar in scope to the CAN-SPAM act for email which has been largely ignored by spammers. The devil's in the details on this one - this ruling only applies to email sent to your phone from the carrier. Most carriers have a special email address they use for your phone (i.e., 2061923343@carrier.com); checking email from your normal account isn't affected. Most importantly, SMS text messages aren't affected at all, which is pretty much what people think of when you say "mobile spam." The long and short of it is that the ruling is basically a loophole closure for the CAN-SPAM act, and doesn't really do much to protect us from all the text message spam on our phones. Hey, at least the FCC is trying...

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Mobile By Joshua Klein

AT&T Wireless to "support" but not sell the Voq

Not that you can put too much stock in these sorts of things, but there's a rumor that AT&T Wireless is backing away from plans to carry Sierra Wireless' new Voq Professional Phone, which runs on Microsoft's Smartphone OS., saying that it'll be supported on their network, but not sold by them. We're guessing that Sierra Wireless and AT&T's first date didn't quite pan out—did Sierra not pay for dinner or open the door for them on the way out? The big question now is what AT&T means by "support"; we're assuming it means they're just talking the kind of suppoer where you can slap your SIM in and you'll be able to make calls (which you can do with any unlocked GSM phone, really), but no one knows.

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News By Joshua Klein

Supermarket cart entertainment

There's nothing more delightful than squealing grubby rugrats racing around the shopping aisles when you're trying to get your Alka-Seltzer morning relief after a big night out. Fortunately British supermarket chain Tesco may have a cure. They recently funded a study that found that three-fourths of parents found shopping with children stressful (which is only surprising that there is a one-fourth that doesn't) and want to develop something called the "Tantrum Tamer", a shopping trolley (that's British-ese for Shopping Cart) twith an electronic screen attached to the handle of the cart for playing DVDs, CDs, and educational games. The real fun, of course, will be in seeing how ruggedized Tesco has to make the things to survive the brutal affections of the 3-9 year-old set that will be torturing these things and how they stop hacker-types from swiping them for home use and cracking them open to feast on the gooey electro-goodness inside.

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News By Joshua Klein

SlimDevices updates the Squeezebox

SlimDevices just prettied up their Squeezebox networked digital audio player a little bit. The two-line, forty-character display on both their wireless and wired models has been replaced with a 280 by 16 pixel graphic display (the display is also available as an upgrade for older models). There are also two new software releases that are available, one featuring an enhanced user interface based on the new display, and the other a visualizer feature for developers to play with.

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Accessories

Accessories By Joshua Klein

Adding Bluetooth to Kodak photo printers

The new Kodak EasyShare Printer Dock Plus isn't really that exceptional; it makes 4x6 inch prints (or multiple pictures on 4x6 inch sheets) directly from both digital cameras and memory cards, something plenty of other manufacturers offer. But what is worth mentioning is that Kodak is getting even deeper behind wireless printing (which they already offer through their Picture Maker G3 kiosks) and in October they're coming out with a Bluetooth USB adapter for this thing that'll make it possible to print pics directly from cameraphones (yes, we know there are other Bluetooth printer adapters and even printers out there, but hey, this is Kodak). It looks like Kodak may actually be paying attention rather than just continuing their steady slide into irrelevance.

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Accessories

Accessories By Joshua Klein

Strobes for phone cams

We've pretty much given up on trying to get take decent pics with a cameraphone, especially since hardly any of them sport a flash, and when they do, it's some anemic LED that can barely cast a shadow. Hopefully helping our plight, Linear Technology has developed a photoflash capacitor system that can recharge a small xenon flash in under a second, which is good because xenon bulbs are hundreds of times brighter than those little LED lights your phone has currently. They're also much closer to natural light, meaning your pics will turn out better. Linear hopes to see its system in cameraphones within 3 to 12 months, until then, continue on with outdoor, sunny-day cameraphone photography only.

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EVs and Transportation

EVs and Transportation By Joshua Klein

Black box for your car?

The National Transportation Safety Board recommended yesterday that all US cars be required to have black boxes like those used in airplanes. Privacy advocates are freaking out because it's not clear who would own the resulting data, but you don't need to be John Gilmore to realize that these things will make it a little harder to argue your way out of a speeding ticket. In any case it's sort of a moot point; the NTSB recommendation came two months after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (which has the actual authority here) said it didn't see a need to require them because automakers were adding them to more models on their own. It looks like black boxes are already coming, required or not, and somebody out there is going to make a mint doing after-market "de-installations" of these things.

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Smartphones By Joshua Klein

A little something more for the ladies: The SGH-E600C, Samsung's latest cellphone for women

We're definitely not hitting up Samsung next time we need advice about the fairer sex. Yeah, their new SGH-E600C (which continues the long tradition of terrible, clunky and forgettable product names)is a "petite" GSM/GPRS tri-band cameraphone with a silvery casing, with a camera that has a multi-shot feature, which can snap 6, 9, or 15 pictures at one shot, and also supports video recording. But aside from the fact that it's just small and pretty, how exactly does it distinguish itself from any of the other tiny cellphones we lust after? [Via PicturePhoning.com]

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Wearables

Wearables By Joshua Klein

Love Jackets - wearable tech for romantics

And some say there's nothing new in fashion these days... Studio 5050's Love Jackets are made in pairs with matching LEDs that blink and chirp when they come within ten feet of each other. They use infrared and a PIC chip to find each other and make their noise, but what's really impressive is that all the hardware is surface mounted, meaning that the tech is as invisible as possible. The components are connected via fabric "conduits" instead of wires, making them even more comfortable and less obtrusive. The same designer has made "HugJackets," which make a different noise along with a light show when the jackets' wearers hug. Now isn't that sickly sweet? There are also sneakers that click like high-heel shoes and a set of bags that make more noise and light the more of them are brought together, proving that tech and fashion are truly not dead — but are indeed strange bedfellows. [Via near near future]

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Space

Space By Joshua Klein

Bluetooth controlled telescope

Looks like a clever hacker took the Mac-based Bluetooth application Salling Clicker (well known to any Bluetooth aware Mac user) and scripted a way to control his hugenormous telescope with it. This means he can whip out his phone and watch his 'scope whiz and whir away to resolve on whatever he likes - no hands, man. Goes to show that megacorps aren't having all the fun; it's still the little guy who comes up with that one cool app from time to time.

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Smartphones By Joshua Klein

FOMA Raku Raku game phone for calorie burn

Proving yet again that they are the godhead of all cell phone technology, DoCoMo has announced the release of the FOMA Raku Raku. Aside from sounding like a Digimon creature, the "lower end phone" makes video calls, has a 0.3 megapixel camera (something hard to imagine in Japan), good-sized QVGA LCD screen, voice readouts, and three buttons on the outside that let users call preassigned numbers without opening the phone (something which exacerbates the already problematic situation of accidental dialing). Of particular interest, however, is that it has an integrated pedometer. Not content with just tacking on some by-your-leave technology, DoCoMo integrated the pedometer with the handset's mailing system, meaning that at a preset time every day the distance walked and subsequent calories burned get sent to a prespecified address. The phone can also be polled by email for the current walking statistics. The only question we have is who it's made for—the last time we checked Japan didn't exactly have a proliferation of fat people in need of pedometer phones.

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Mobile By Joshua Klein

End of an era - T-Mobile kills free WAP access

Using WAP to browse from a cellphone was never all it was cracked up to be. The carriers tried to convince everyone that squirting a few lines of text from their pre-processed sites to our phones passed for "the Internet" and were surprised when users didn't come clamoring, but T-Mobile let us have all we wanted of it. Now that's suddenly over. Instead users are getting redirected to T-Mobile's "T-Zones" site with a page stating that unlimited access is now $4.99 a month. Note that when we said WAP wasn't all it was cracked up to be we didn't say it wasn't useful; some folks made a daily habit of getting their fix of information chunks on their phones that way, and T-Mobile just dropping a fee on it like that is sorta frustrating. [Thanks David]

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Mobile By Joshua Klein

Korean parents track children via cell phones w/ears

Joining the growing trend in Asian (and the rest of the world) parents in South Korea can now track their children by foisting ugly-looking cell phones with "antennas shaped like human ears" on them. The phone has four buttons for preset numbers ("Mom" and "Dad" are suggested). Assuming you can get your child to carry this sort of thing around, the phone has built-in GPS so you can track their every move. And we though child safety laws had become widespread - if you can think of a better way to provoke abuse by other children than a sissy phone with plastic ears, please let us know.

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Smartphones By Joshua Klein

MPx and MPx220 to connect to RIM services

The story on Motorola's new MPx and MPx220 cell phones just gets sweeter and sweeter. Now they're announcing that they'll support connectivity to RIM's BlackBerry services. This means secure wireless access to email and corporate data. No word yet if they'll be emulating the "always-on" aspects of Blackberry's service, but for businesses this could be big deal. We all know how important it is to have access to triple-encrypted emails when expensing those meetings with our "exotic masseuse."

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Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity By Joshua Klein

No more infrared nudie pics of Japanese Olympic swimmers

We just bought an infrared camera for nothing now. Foiling our plans to sneakily take naked pics of them, the Japanese Olympic swimteam is using a new material for swimsuits called "Video Proof," which is designed to remain opaque even when filmed by infrared cameras. Descente, the Japanese company which makes the fabric, says that this will help the swimmers concentrate on the competition since they won't be so worried about pervs taking photos of them.

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News By Joshua Klein

Glass houses

Polish-born architect Marcin Panpuch has designed a spherical, transparent houseboat (that's not a boat) designed to solve London's housing shortage by apparently creating a free-space-on-the-Thames shortage. The sphere would be divided into three floors, each built around a central core holding the stairs, kitchen, and bathroom. Inhabitants would use the lower floor as a bedroom, the upper floor as a living space, and the bottom floor (below the surface of the river) for storage, water tanks, heating, and computers. Retractable screens would be used for privacy, although you gotta wonder how much privacy you'd really get bobbing about in a big bubble on a river in the middle of London. [Via Mobile-Weblog]

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